Counterinsurgency in (un)changing times? Colonialism,hearts and minds,and the war on terror

Imperialism and the temporal lens

Using time as a conceptual anchor, I draw on elements of postcolonialism and social theory ¹³ to unearth how embedded notions of the Other in the COIN doctrine help explain its ongoing failure. Encounters with difference rarely occur on an equal playing field. US counterinsurgency is a prime example: an encounter of [unreflexive] neo-imperialism, a ‘universalized’ solution to a localized problem. ¹⁴ As illustrated below, the original doctrine cemented around colonial conquest and pacification. European powers justified their expansion through the rhetoric of the civilizing mission: ‘benevolent’ subjugation under the pretext of remolding the ‘savages’ of the East in Europe’s own image. ¹⁵ Contemporary engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq were framed in similarly unironic language – if perhaps unconscious. The subtext remains: ‘this is for your own good, we promise’. It underscores an assumption that the logic sustaining the narrative of American Exceptionalism, so firmly engrained in the US collective psyche, is also a universal logic. In this light, winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of indigenous populations in far-away places is in many ways an attempt to erase the natives’ situated sense of Self in favor of some putatively rational and globalized liberal identity, one that might originally have been ‘made in America’, but which dons the mantle of a view from nowhere. ¹⁶ Importantly, it is a doctrinal practice that has endured in essence over the centuries, even if the temporal longevity of COIN’s civilizing mission and the underlying Self/Other suppositions that inform that mission are often disguised or forgotten today by those who practice it.

Postcolonialism, a broad array of theoretical approaches spanning multiple disciplines, critically engages with such ‘memory loss’ by highlighting the ongoing effects of imperialism, including the perpetuation of a ‘Western’ mindset that (advertently or inadvertently) continues to marginalize the rest of the world. ¹⁷ It problematizes the tacit leverage of the West’s power to enforce a particular vision of how the world should be, a vision that is often perceived by the actors implementing it to be universally desired and beneficial. ¹⁸ As Spivak remonstrates, the subaltern must reclaim her agency and give voice to the epistemic violence done to her and her non-Western ways of knowing. She must expose the myths of empire that inflect past and present relationships and policies of the West to the rest. ¹⁹ This form of critique highlights the temporal continuity of certain Western assumptions about race and ethnicity that underlie contemporary geopolitics, even as those assumptions are often divorced from their historical roots, filtered through normalizing power structures, and rendered anodyne. US counterinsurgency as a subject of inquiry often falls victim to the same ahistorical whitewashing. ²⁰

Postcolonial critiques of COIN address such whitewashing by exposing its brutality. The colony is understood as a site of exception that reifies Western sovereignty by suspending judicial order and reframing violence as a ‘service of civilization’. ²¹ These power dynamics create a never-ending need to subdue because the violence and exploitation inherent to pacification ultimately provokes resistance. ²² It follows that counterinsurgency only appears counter- from the imperialist’s position; that the real counterinsurgency is in fact a response to and denial of the authority of empire. ²³ Pacification itself sews the seeds of its perpetuity. ²⁴ I draw a similar conclusion from within the confines of US policymaking, albeit predicated on very different assumptions. ²⁵

Restoring the colonial past to an admittedly Americentric analysis of the present helps foreground the power imbalances inherent to US encounters with non-Western Others, and problematizes the underlying assumptions built into the policy goal of winning hearts and minds. The backbone of counterinsurgency for the imperial Self rests on the logic that a pacified civilian population is the key to defeating guerrilla insurgents. In other words, if hearts and minds have been won (past tense), then the war is essentially over. However, despite all the tools of control available to the counterinsurgents, the possibility of Otherness remains. ²⁶ Discursively, therefore, COIN is framed as a never-ending process of trying to win hearts and minds (present tense). As Campbell and Hom note, the conventional idea of ‘war-time’ is as a discrete and exceptional period of violence bracketed by the quiet normalcy of ‘peace-time’. That characterization does not apply here. Instead, the ‘war-time’ of counterinsurgency is better understood as the unending grind of pacifying-time, forever in the present tense. ²⁷ The potential in the counterinsurgent’s mind for another ‘enemy Other’ to be hiding among ‘friendly Others’ suggests that the war can never be fully or successfully won. As such, COIN is self-perpetuating, a forever war.

Moreover, it is a form of warfare infused with the logic of imperial control and the Orientalist gaze. What the French military generals of the 19th century crafted into doctrine was a rethinking of war not as an exceptional ‘politics by other means’ with a discrete termination point, but as a completely unexceptional colonial ‘politics as usual’. The material benefits of conquest were linked to a constant policing and exploitation of the Other with an understanding that co-habitation required sustained vigilance in the form of the pacifying tools of COIN. ²⁸ Contemporary counterinsurgencies are not framed in the rubric of imperial conquest, but they remain pacifying wars that are defined by the impression of insurgent Others lurking just out of sight, which as a result justifies the normalization of violence into the everyday, even as it did almost two centuries ago. Tracing current practices back to the 19th century reveals the presence of shared biases about the Other, which, unearthed, shed light on the dismal track record of COIN as contemporary US strategy.

The birth of COIN

Countering insurgencies has a rich history tracing back to antiquity. ²⁹ But counterinsurgency as an established military doctrine distinct from conventional warfare really took shape at the turn of the 19th century with the Peninsular War of 1808, when the peasants of Spain and Portugal took up arms against Napoleon. This wave of popular resistance was described at the time as guerrilla, the diminutive form of guerra (Spanish for war). The formal characterization of warfare defined by a tactical imbalance in power and strength developed later in the century as European states expanded their colonial holdings across Africa and Southeast Asia, and veterans of such wars, such as British Major General Sir Charles Callwell, returned home to write about their exploits. ³⁰

Yet it was the French who made the greatest impact in translating their experiences combatting what they deemed insurrections and lawlessness into the population-centric ‘winning hearts and minds’ that we know today as counterinsurgency. Two military generals stand out as the doctrine’s primary architects: Maréchal Thomas Robert Bugeaud (1784–1849), and Maréchal Joseph-Simon Gallieni (1849–1916). ³¹ Bugeaud was one of the first to understand and espouse the political dimensions of pacification, which he paired with a radical change in military tactics. Gallieni drew on Bugeaud’s footprint by systematizing the approach into what is still taught today as the oil spot method. Both men wrote about the need to win acquiescence from non-combatants to achieve some measure of political stability, and their legacy is clearly discernable in the US engagements in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Thomas Bugeaud began his military career fighting the guerrillas in Spain during the Peninsular War but made his mark in Algeria, where in 1840, as governor-general, he radically revamped the French colonial response to an ongoing uprising by adopting his opponents’ razzia method of systematic raids and ambushes. Razzias, otherwise known as ‘flying columns’, were far more adroit than conventional tactics. Small, lightly armed, agile, and mobile, they were designed to be able to attack quickly, work in tandem to swarm the enemy, and retreat just as quickly. Bugeaud used the razzias, despite their modest size, to terrorize not only the rebels, but the civilian populations as well, often provoking public condemnation back in France for his brutality. As Callwell notes, however, Bugeaud was one of the first to understand ‘that he had to deal not with a hostile army but a hostile population. . . and that to bring them to reason he must reach them through their crops, their flocks, and their property’. ³² The ruthlessness of the French – massacres, rape, forced relocation, internment, and destruction of property – initially cowed civilians into submission, ostensibly ‘pacifying’ the countryside and denying the opposition a necessary support base. ³³ Although not sanctioned, the US engaged in a similar pattern of behavior in Vietnam over a century later, with such tragedies as the My Lai massacre a silent testament to Bugeaud. ³⁴

Despite his proclivity for the use of force, Bugeaud acknowledged that any military achievements were only sustainable if the native population bought into the endeavor. ³⁵ In an effort to gain compliance from the conquered tribes, and based on his belief in ‘the necessity of governing Arabs by Arabs’, he reestablished what were known as bureaux arabes. ³⁶ Spread throughout the country, a bureau typically included a mix of French and indigenous soldiers and civil functionaries, a precursor to similar US programs in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Bugeaud’s goal was to force the two cultures to work together, ultimately to encourage greater commercial development between the colony and her metropole. ³⁷ Moreover, he attempted to organize them to reflect local tribal structure, arguing that any French colonial administration of Algeria had to incorporate existing hierarchies, traditions, and customs. Arab affairs officials were tasked with intelligence gathering to maintain control and domination yet warned to do so under the guise of impartiality, maintaining and fostering the broader claim to a mission civilisatrice. According to Bugeaud, the officer ‘should not hesitate by any means to put himself often among the populations: visit the markets, the tribes, and listen to the locals’ complaints’. ³⁸

Recognizing that pacification was both a military and political affair, he aggressively campaigned in Paris for more funding and greater control of the colony, arguing that ‘war in Africa and continental war have no similarities’; that successful occupation required as many as 60,000 men to remain after the initial conquest ‘for an indeterminant time, which could be long’. ³⁹ In another parallel with contemporary counterinsurgency, Bugeaud stressed that his men were not simply soldiers but construction workers, administrators, cultural experts, and whatever else was required, ⁴⁰ a sentiment that echoes today’s ‘COIN-dinistas’ characterization of COIN as ‘armed social work’. ⁴¹

Joseph-Simon Gallieni came up the ranks a generation later and solidified Bugeaud’s practices into a more formal marriage between the political and the tactical. Given command in 1892 of northern Vietnam (Tonkin), Gallieni’s mission was to root out bands of Chinese and Vietnamese ‘pirates’ that plagued the region, preying on the indigenous tribesmen (known collectively as les montagnards), and effectively halting all regional commerce and colonial infrastructure projects. Like Bugeaud before him, Gallieni divided his soldiers into small, mobile, and independent units that he dispersed across the countryside. He then adopted what he called the tâche d’huile (oil spot) tactic – still taught today – where pacification efforts combining physical force and political skill spread out from an initial location, slowly growing to cover the entire region. The political component of pacification typically included the provision of some social service or public good like a well or a market, meant to attract locals. Intelligence officers would then mingle with the crowd to get a sense of the human terrain. Commanders used that information to direct ‘flying columns’ of soldiers into the mountains to ferret out the networks of rebels hiding there. After demonstrating his ability and willingness to use brutal force, Gallieni employed what was called la politique des races, a divide and conquer strategy of negotiating separate ‘lucrative’ deals with the various factions, thereby forcing them to work together to create a sustainable economic relationship that supposedly benefited all, including the once beleaguered locals. ⁴²

Sent to Madagascar in 1896, Gallieni again deployed his oil spot method to put down an intensifying peasant rebellion. ⁴³ Like Bugeaud’s bureaux arabes, Gallieni reorganized the colony into territoire militaire that stemmed out from the capital into smaller cercles and still smaller secteurs. Like Bugeaud, he attempted to align these divisions with pre-existing Malagasy districts, though at each constituency level, the French retained complete military and civil control. ⁴⁴ As he had done in Vietnam, and Bugeaud before him, Gallieni’s territorial reorganization was accompanied by an ongoing show of force to push back the opposition as well as convince the other inhabitants of France’s ability to ‘protect’ them. ⁴⁵ Reiterating the distinction between what he was doing and conventional warfare, Gallieni himself wrote that successful counterinsurgency was predicated on a combination of political action and military might. Pacification and possession of a colony required ‘intimate contact’ with the indigenous population in order ‘to seek to know their patterns of behavior and mental state, to strive to satisfy their needs’ so to draw them to the new colonial institution, to persuade them of its merit. ⁴⁶

The legacy of these two men is substantial but often overlooked. Both officers recognized that successful counterinsurgency (from their point of view) centered on the civilian population, but that a foreign ruler could never completely win the loyalty of the people he ruled. As a result, they also believed that [ruthless] military control over conquered lands and peoples was the only way to ‘destroy any seed of rebellion that might arise’. ⁴⁷ However, military control meant more than the threat or use of force. ⁴⁸ After all, ‘destruction is easy, reconstruction is much harder’. ⁴⁹ Bugeaud let loose the razzias with their indiscriminate violence on ‘unpacified’ villages, even as he attempted to build bridges between the two cultures. Gallieni allegedly took a slightly more measured approach to violence and tried to cultivate good will among the people – or at least persuade them of France’s supposed benevolence. ⁵⁰ Both employed native troops and fostered collaboration with indigenous civil society. Both were deemed successful by Paris. . . at least at the time.

From Vietnamese hearts to Iraqi minds

US prosecution of the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq began as conventional affairs. However, all three at some point drew liberally – if inadvertently – on Bugeaud’s and Gallieni’s theories of population pacification as the lynchpin to isolating insurgents from their non-combatant support base. ⁵¹ That heritage provides important insights into why all three American engagements largely failed. In this section, I highlight the temporal longevity of COIN as a military doctrine by outlining the major commonalities between the French and the Americans. In the next section, I explore how a temporal lens also exposes the assumptions and paradoxes of counterinsurgency as it is practiced today. While postcolonial studies often assess all three interventions as problematic from the start, ⁵² my argument here is that they were ineffective and damaging even on the premises of American national security and military policy.

The Vietnam War originated as a contest against Viet Cong rebels in the South, and those efforts have subsequently helped define the conflict as the United States’ first modern counterinsurgency. Four programs in particular reflect the French Maréchals’ influence. The first began a few years after France’s defeat in 1954. Increasingly worried about communist influence in South Vietnam, the Kennedy administration deployed US special forces in the late 1950s to gain the trust and support of the region’s minority groups – the same montagnards of Gallieni’s time – as a bulwark against remnants of the nationalist Viet Minh (soon to become the Viet Cong [VC]). The CIA organized the hill people into Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) and trained them in guerrilla warfare, efforts that mirrored Bugeaud’s use of native tribes (or ‘goum’) as ‘law’ enforcement for the bureaux arabes in Algeria. ⁵³ Roger Hilsman, a COIN expert close to Kennedy, summarized the main threads of this plan in a 1962 memo, which was one of the first US documents about the war to emphasize the political necessity of winning hearts and minds. ⁵⁴

The US-sponsored Diem government also established its own pacification program in the early 1960s in consultation with British COIN expert, Sir Robert Thompson. ⁵⁵ Predicated on Gallieni’s oil spot method, villagers were resettled into ‘strategic hamlets’ beginning in ‘low-risk’ areas and expanding outward. The new villages would be close to the central government in Saigon, which would then be able to provide better social services like medicine and education. Officials would ensure compliance by enforcing curfews and controlling access to food. ⁵⁶ US marines established ‘Country Fair’ operations, another example of the oil spot method, beginning in late 1965. These programs were similarly designed to provide local populations with social services like medical treatment and entertainment, as well as safeguard the harvest, giving the marines an opportunity to gain intelligence, the good will of the villagers, and the ability to cordon and search villages for VC. They also established Combined Action Platoons (CAPs), whereby each platoon had a few dozen marines and twice as many indigenous fighters (mostly from minority tribes) that lived together in villages and were tasked with rooting out VC, attacking their infrastructure, ‘protecting’ civilians, gathering information, and training more militias.

Like in Bugeaud’s time, however, all four programs suffered from poor coordination, poor understanding of villagers’ needs, abuses of power, and anemic government support. ⁵⁷ Robert Komer attempted to rectify this in 1967 by establishing Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), but his efforts to switch to the ‘clear and hold’ approach of Gallieni were generally rebuffed. ⁵⁸ Forced relocation continued apace and remained fraught by inflated assessments of success, making any claims about civilian security suspect. The new Phoenix Program facilitated intelligence sharing and accelerated identification and arrest of VC, though it was also fraught with serious abuses and mistrust, leading to its reputation as an assassination program. After Tet, renewed vigor infused efforts to win hearts and minds, but the US government’s proclivity for statistical evidence of success led to further abuses and corruption, despite attempts to tamp down on indiscriminate violence. ⁵⁹ Even so, the reemphasis on hearts and minds came too late by most strategic calculations to have any discernable effect on the ground. ⁶⁰

The loss in Vietnam had a major effect on military doctrine in the years following the war, resulting in COIN’s tarnished reputation and exile. ⁶¹ Nonetheless, despite the military’s focus on quick conventional wars of ‘shock and awe’, including in Afghanistan and Iraq, countering insurgency in the war on terror began almost organically on the ground as Coalition troops tried to navigate the political and defensive goals put forward by the US government after 9/11. ⁶² During the initial stages of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, ‘search and destroy’ missions swept the countryside, often within population centers, resulting in civilian deaths and what Kilcullen calls the creation of accidental guerrillas. ⁶³ Since this was counterproductive to winning over the population, commanders in the field soon shifted to a ‘permanent presence’ methodology, predicated on ‘clear, hold, and expand’, or ‘clear, hold, build’, essentially Gallieni’s oil spot method. In this new formulation, forces conducted military and civil programs to first consolidate pro-government areas, hold the ground, protect the government and key infrastructure, and use it as a base of operations for raids on insurgents in the region. Success necessitated living with the local population to gain its trust and to help separate innocent from insurgent. As this ground was pacified, the military was sent farther afield – outside their ‘force protection zone’ – to be a thorn in the side of the gone-to-ground insurgents and a ‘forceful reminder’ to locals to maintain their neutrality. Like the French before, the Coalition relied on mobility and agility to target the insurgents, basically recreating a 21st century version of the razzia. Building roads allowed the Coalition to establish protective ‘bubbles’ around population centers and link them together, what Eikenberry described as ‘ink lines’, a variation on the oil spot, separating the people from the Taliban and connecting them to the central government. ⁶⁴

Perhaps the most distinct policy effort to win over the population took shape as provincial reconstruction teams (PRT), which began in Afghanistan in 2002. Just as Bugeaud’s bureaux arabes and Gallieni’s cercles militaires before them, PRTs were designed ‘to protect civilian populations, eliminate insurgent leaders and infrastructure, and help establish a legitimate and accountable host-nation government able to deliver essential human services’. ⁶⁵ Composed of a mix of US military personnel and civilian officials, their mandate was to engage with government, military, police, tribal, village, and religious leaders from Afghanistan’s provinces, seeking to relay information between the capital and the villages, provide security and support to local governments and practices like the Loya Jirga, train police and military units in the region, and provide humanitarian and development assistance as needed. ⁶⁶ They were also instrumental in implementing Gallieni’s oil spot method of pacification.

Unlike Afghanistan, the insurgency in Iraq was an urban affair, with much of the fighting taking place in the capital itself. PRTs also operated in Iraq, beginning in November 2005. Instead of living amongst the population, Iraqi PRTs were primarily located on military bases and commuted to work with military escorts. After the announcement of the surge in 2007, a number of new teams were created and this time embedded with Combat Brigade Teams (CBTs) in the field to support COIN operations, help build local government capacity, and foster development, security training, and conflict resolution.

Despite these efforts, however, the success of ‘winning hearts and minds’ as outlined in the army’s 2006 counterinsurgency manual remains hotly contested, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, much of the recent literature on the two theaters of the war on terror argues that US coalition reconstruction efforts were implemented primarily to prevent enemy influence, with scant thought paid to the welfare or cultural needs of the inhabitants. ⁶⁷ The same critique was made of US efforts to pacify the villages in South Vietnam. ⁶⁸ Scotton argues that failure was further assured by hopelessly corrupt governments, withdrawal or uncertainty of US fiscal and military support, and the bounded determination of the insurgents themselves. ⁶⁹ That determination, according to Hunt, reflects the colonial roots of COIN and points to a fundamental structural problem with the doctrine itself, which is the often impossible task of discriminating between combatants and civilians. ⁷⁰

The difficulty for occupying forces of determining the ‘enemy’ is not unique to contemporary COIN. Counterinsurgency has always relied on making clear ‘the blurring of civilian and combat spaces’. ⁷¹ Common ‘technologies of rule’ designed to quantify and categorize occupied populations are paramount to such efforts and include taking a census, using biometrics, creating databases, surveilling, nurturing human informants, as well as training a local police and military. This was as true during Bugeaud’s tenure in Algeria when the task fell to the bureaux arabes as it is today. Borrowing from Jeremy Bentham, Foucault famously developed the idea of ‘panopticism’ as a means of biopower, and more broadly, governmentality. ⁷² At its core, the state ‘disciplines and normalizes bodies through the exercise of a visual power that seemingly has no limits’. ⁷³ The surveillance society is thus predicated on and operated by an ‘architecture of power through visual means’. ⁷⁴ In the context of counterinsurgency, however, this architecture reaffirms the devalued currency of Others’ bodies.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, that architecture was most clearly depicted by the establishment of the Human Terrain System, an army scheme with roots in Vietnam’s CORDS program, that employed social scientists to provide the military with a better cultural understanding of the local population through the use of survey data and other biometrics. The reorientation of the Orientalist gaze through data analytics and biometric technologies is really a continuation of population control regimes adapted during the height of colonialism, such as with the bureaux arabes and cercles militaires. The problematic link between anthropological information gathering and military advising underlines a postcolonial critique of surveillance as a form of biopolitics ‘articulated with other political functions aimed at accepting, rejecting, or managing bodies’. ⁷⁵ Other bodies, dangerous bodies. ⁷⁶ In this regard, one of the main purposes or tasks of surveillance is, again, to distinguish friend from enemy. While the HTS system was lauded to the public as a ‘kinder, gentler form of occupation’, ⁷⁷ the US Department of Defense in other documents acknowledged, albeit euphemistically, that the derived data would not only help win hearts and minds, but also serve as an element of combat power. ⁷⁸ In the context of counterinsurgency, contemporary surveillance practices, as their precursors in the 19th century, are a means of foreign power tutelage over ‘proper’ behavior, but whose rejection means potential death.

Time, orientalism, and identity in the new civilizing mission

As illustrated above, adopting a temporal lens to analyze the logics of counterinsurgency illustrates COIN’s longevity as a geopolitical practice of winning hearts and minds to pacify ‘disruptive Others’. Yet, COIN rarely draws attention to its ignominious past. Even the 20th century French officer David Galula, the ostensible inspiration for the US Army’s 2006 COIN manual, has recently been sidelined in US military circles as too imperialist. ⁷⁹ Nonetheless, resurrecting COIN’s long history and tethering its present to its colonial past problematizes its use as merely a clinical tactic of irregular warfare. More than its longue durée, however, a temporal lens also highlights two other contradictions in the doctrine, both of which help explain its ongoing failure to further US interests. One returns to the difficulty of distinguishing friend from enemy, a difficulty that relegates COIN to a perpetual present-tense. The other contrasts this present-tense with modern war frameworks that are meant to end.

A semantic exploration of the discourse of winning hearts and minds highlights a paradox between anticipated outcomes and the ongoing nature of the actions meant to achieve those outcomes. In other words, COIN is discursively framed so that its successful conclusion is (at least partially) defined by having won the hearts and minds of Others through one’s actions, yet COIN is semantically expressed as a never-ending endeavor, always-in-the-process of trying to win. Two assumptions built into the doctrine help explain this contradiction. First, COIN presumes that there are blank hearts and minds available to be won; that any ‘rational’ Vietnamese, Afghan, or Iraqi would understand that the US only wants what is best for them. ⁸⁰ As such, a target population should overlook the fact that a foreign power has invaded their country; they should see heavily armed foreigners as knights in shining armor rather than the thing from which they need protecting. In other words, COIN ignores the relationship between power and identity that lies at the heart of postcolonial theory and has been an ongoing historical marker for most of the Global South for generations.

Nested within the supposed presence of vacant subjects to be acted upon is a second contradiction: some of those bodies are winnable and some are not. For COIN to exist in the first place, some form of perceived ‘disruption’ to the imperial Self’s ‘order’ must be present, yet not all Others are thought to be disruptive. Moreover, it is up to the counterinsurgent to determine who is who. A major thread in identity studies posits that social identity is a mental organization around what one is not or does not wish to be, typically framed as the dialectic Self/Other. ⁸¹ At its extreme, identity is a practice of differentiation that results in the dichotomy friend/enemy, which, according to Carl Schmitt, lies at the heart of all politics. ⁸² Counterinsurgency as a doctrine and a practice relies on the outsider coming into a foreign environment and being able to identify the supposedly dangerous and disposable few from the innocent masses. By this logic, it is the imperial Self alone who has the power to determine the Other’s identity. Accordingly, impositions of political power erase the Other’s own subjectivity and, in a sense, render her an empty vessel out of historical time. ⁸³

Nevertheless, the friend/enemy of COIN is fundamentally ambiguous, which is partly predicated on the fuzzy distinction in the doctrine between the invisible or imagined guerrilla and the visible and present civilian. As Gusterson notes, ‘While providing the casus belli and embodying the nemesis of Western civilization, [the guerrillas] are almost invariably hidden, or just over the horizon, or out of focus, or in disguise, or masked and veiled, or anonymous, or in caricature’. ⁸⁴ Edward Said, writing about 19th century attitudes toward ‘the East’, argued that the West essentialized ‘the Orient’ through a gaze that eroticized and rendered ‘strange’ the Other, reproducing him as uncivilized, exceptionally different, less-than, in many ways a repository for all the fears and insecurities of the Self. ⁸⁵ The resulting deformed representation of the Other has served to reify imperial power, creating a permissive environment of violence as the unspoken backbone of ‘civilized tutelage’ and persuasion. Certainly, this ‘permission’ was further reinforced in the minds of many Coalition soldiers by the fact that some of those ‘Others’ were literally trying to kill them. Still, a challenge remains for COIN practitioners regarding civilians who are at once Other but deemed ‘innocent’. How do you distinguish between an insurgent and the baker down the street with a wife and two kids? To the imperial Self, they appear to look the same; the line between rebel and villager is paper thin. ⁸⁶

That problem of differentiation highlights the main challenge of doing COIN, which is at once to kill the bad guys and protect the good guys, even as the bad and good guys by and large come from the same place, eat the same food, pray to the same God. The narrative that has evolved since Bugeaud’s time reflects this challenge, but in increasingly liberal terms. Bugeaud did not care about the welfare of the local Algerians as long as they were compliant. To him, COIN was first and foremost a tactical affair. Gallieni recognized that convincing the locals that he did care about their welfare (whether true or not) was necessary to the success of his military operations. The Vietnam War hews close to this template insofar as pacifying the villagers was primarily a means of extirpating VC guerrillas. Afghanistan and Iraq were both framed far more in the 21st century moralizing rhetoric of duty, progress, and values: protect the innocent; show them the benefits of democracy; give them a taste for ‘modern’ life. This, even as Coalition forces were warned that civilians remained potential insurgents-in-waiting. The innate contradiction of what was asked of the men and women of the armed forces has undoubtedly played a role in the epidemic of PTSD among veterans. ⁸⁷ The ‘logic’ of COIN: protect the kid playing in the street, even if another kid just blew himself up at a market a few blocks over. FM 3-24 instructs soldiers to be mindful of how they appear to civilians – body armor, large guns, convoys, MRAPs – and to shed much of this in daily interactions to build a sense of trust. Yet doing so leaves his or her own body vulnerable to the sniper or IED that for all they know may or may not be waiting down the way.

The imperial Self’s uncertainy about the Other’s ‘true’ identity ultimately underscores the paradox of pacification. Uncertainty forecloses the possibility of successful termination, of a move from ‘pacifying-time’ to ‘pacified-time’, because the next guy, or the guy after that, could be an insurgent. Ultimately, the language of COIN justifying pacification uses time paradoxically to both promise a better future after successfully countering opposition and to imply that there can never be a real end to that opposition.

The impossibility of contemporary COIN’s successful termination feeds directly into my third temporal lens. Bugeaud and Gallieni designed their pacifying-time with the understanding that they were the newest owners of the territory they were attempting to govern. In a sense, the territory itself was absorbed into the Self, even as the native inhabitants remained potentially problematic ‘Others’. As a result, pacification was not an ‘exceptional’ act of war. Rather, the brutality, looting, relocations, etc., became a mundane part of daily governance. Today’s conflicts no longer center on territorial conquest. Foreign interventions are understood by their progenitors to be temporary and exceptional deviations necessary to return a territory to some sort of ‘legitimate’ Westphalian ‘normal’. There is always an expiration date, even if unspecified. However, if COIN was originally designed as a reconceptualization of day-to-day governmentality, then understanding today’s counterinsurgencies as exceptional moments of war erases the contextual infrastructure on which the doctrine was based. Coupled with the notion that COIN is syntactically always present tense, this expiration date forecloses the possibility of any lasting [imperial] victory. Returning to the recent withdrawal of US and allied forces from Afghanistan, Biden’s and his predecessors’ assurances that there would be a timely withdrawal meant that the Taliban could bide their time until the foreigners left, knowing that ultimately the US was simply not invested enough to continually risk its Self on distant ‘Others’.

In the colonial mindset, ‘war-time’ was a necessary precursor to productive exploitation and civilized co-habitation. . . if not exactly peace-time, then certainly a hoped-for ‘pacified-time’. In this characterization, the perceived bounties – moral and material – of pacified-time for the French justified the immoral and exceptional excesses of war-time, or pacifying-time. Similar dynamics run through contemporary counterinsurgency operations. The Bush Administration believed at first that a dose of ‘shock and awe’ would quickly cow terrorists and those states that sponsored them into a ‘pacified-time’ of democratization and American civilizing tutelage. Even in Vietnam, preponderant American military strength was assumed to be the lynchpin to pacifying a population flirting with Soviet and Maoist communism. However, in both the colonial and contemporary cases, war-time blurred into the adaptation of new tactics that drew heavily on a different time horizon altogether: one that no longer separated out the exceptional violence of war-time but instead transformed it into the unexceptional day-to-day of pacification.

Campbell and Hom argue that ‘contemporary wars seem to proliferate opportunities to remake social and political meaning in ways that perpetuate war-time logics’. ⁸⁸ I argue that this is not unique to contemporary wars but a certain type of war that is deeply embedded in the logic of imperial control and the Orientalist gaze. In these cases, the stylized limit connotatively promised by the term ‘war-time’ loses relevance or coherence as a temporal marker since war-time blurs unapologetically into pacifying-time. The problem for those at the Pentagon is exactly this tacit promise of a successful (peaceful/pacified) conclusion to violence. Pacifying wars do not have term limits.

What the French military generals of the 19th century crafted into doctrine was a complete rethinking of war not as an exceptional ‘politics by other means’ (to abuse Clausewitz), but as a completely unexceptional colonial ‘politics as usual’. Moreover, a politics in perpetuity. Contemporary scholars and practitioners have forgotten or ignored the ‘in perpetuity’ in their retooling of counterinsurgency to fit current perceived threats. However, reincorporating both the temporal and the imperial components back into an analysis of counterinsurgency exposes hard realities: war-time has once again more aptly become pacifying-time with no clear end-horizon and no clear-cut spatial boundaries. The absence of space and time as limiting factors to this particular kind of warfare has important ramifications for how we think about conflict, violence, and war both at home and abroad.

COIN is inherently an occupation strategy that was initially designed with the longue durée in mind. Ignoring its origins fails to recognize that its tactics were rooted in an ongoing and ostensibly permanent system of control and subjugation. Bugeaud and Gallieni were reacting to a population and a space that they intended to stay in. Even then, while scholars of irregular warfare tend to laud the French officers and their campaigns as successes, I suggest, following Pham and Muppidi, that the Other in both cases simply waited, like the Taliban, never fully conceding defeat. ⁸⁹ Colonial Algeria continued to be plagued by attempts in the hinterland to rise up against the French, culminating eventually in the success of the National Liberation Front (FLN) a century later. The Vietnamese continued to resist as well, eventually defeating the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. And even though Madagascar had a peaceful transition to independence, the French only acquiesced after brutally suppressing a nationalist uprising in 1948. Ultimately, even the longue durée was not enough time for the French. Indeed, pacification breeds future conflagration.

Conclusion

As I have said elsewhere, ‘COIN is the postmodern Manifest Destiny of our time’. ⁹⁰ While territorial aggrandizement is no longer the driving force, the US instead uses the playbook to spread its influence and build up others in its image, ostensibly to prevent terror and more immediately help stabilize a region. Yet, Vietnam, 20 years of the war on terror, and the catastrophic withdrawal of Afghanistan illustrate that countering insurgencies is not the nation’s strong suit. Still, the military doctrine maintains its place in the Department of Defense’s irregular warfare toolbox, despite Washington’s pivot back to the more conventional threats posed by China and Russia. ⁹¹ Doctrines of warfare necessarily adapt over time to meet new challenges, absorb new technologies, and face new geopolitical realities. But such evolutions do not absolve us from understanding the historical origins of the doctrines we continue to invoke in the present, nor do they absolve us from clearly grasping the ramifications of that heritage.

Recoupling COIN’s past to its present presents Americans with several uncomfortable but crucial facts. We must acknowledge that the supposedly benevolent tools the United States wields in the name of freedom, especially in the Global South, were once used to sustain colonial empires. That past denudes us of easy platitudes about upholding liberty and human rights or protecting the weak, and it cautions us to guard against the softened rhetoric of pacification that has characterized recent US interventions. ⁹²

The rehabilitation of COIN’s past also provokes reflection on the continued proliferation of counterinsurgency practices around the world, as well as in the United States itself. President Bush’s original declaration that ‘the zone of armed conflict against al Qaeda encompasses the entire globe’ ⁹³ framed the war on terror in such a way that any Islamist threat potentially justifies some sort of US presence, with or without the public’s explicit consent. ⁹⁴ Gventer et al. go further to note that the COIN discourse has been appropriated and used as a ‘political commodity’ to more broadly justify Western interventions abroad as morally appropriate and necessary. ⁹⁵

To wit, even as the COIN doctrine itself has again fallen out of favor at the Pentagon, it has been replaced by a COIN-lite amalgam of policing and counterterrorism that in January 2019 affected at least 80 countries world-wide. ⁹⁶ These current operations do not require large troop deployments, nor are they designed to be constant combat. ⁹⁷ Operations are typically composed of small units of special forces, private contractors, ⁹⁸ and employees of the Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Their missions are to advise and assist local forces on how best to kill/capture terrorists while building up, defending, and policing the people and institutions that compose civil society. ⁹⁹ These deployments highlight the need for a broader temporal deconstruction of the liberal agenda writ large.

COIN’s influence is also not uniquely overseas. A growing literature reimagines military pacification operations as imperial laboratories ¹⁰⁰ that incubate and transmit certain practices back home to be incorporated into domestic policing. For instance, recent social unrest in the United States has been met by an increasingly martial response, particularly the racial justice protests that peaked in the summer of 2020. ¹⁰¹ The theoretical framework I outline here compliments the domestic angle and offers additional opportunities for future analysis.

Most critical security and postcolonial studies on COIN illustrate why the underlying logics sustaining the doctrine are fundamentally flawed. In this paper, I have drawn on several notions of time and identity to help unpack a knot of contradictory assumptions buried within the doctrine itself to help explain its failure as US policy. By drawing on its own logics, I have attempted to show that ‘safeguarding’ the United States through COIN (from communism, terrorism, and/or civil unrest) unconsciously perpetuates a centuries-old imperialist mindset predicated on the Self/Other dialectic of the civilizing mission. The doctrine also relies on and contributes to a nebulous understanding of American strategic aims and the nature and scope of the threat, which has allowed the US government to extend the war’s frontiers across space and time. Lastly, it ignores the strategic and tactical logics linking the doctrine to its original temporal frame of permanent acquisition and instead problematically assumes that the same doctrine can work as a temporary loan. We do ourselves a disservice in both policy-making and scholarship if we continue to view COIN as a feasible doctrine out of time and out of history.